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How To Build A Social Marketing Plan

A new study undertaken by the Content Marketing Institute shows that marketing distribution within social media has greatly increased. This trend is expected to continue in 2013, as the impact of social media on driving and converting leads becomes more measurable.

If connecting people to your brand has such implications on business operations, efforts invested in social marketing should not be gambled. You need a solid plan to develop and engage your audience successfully:

Define your target audience

A good way to ascertain it can be based around your current customers. They will likely represent the market you will find the most success in. Furthermore, developing new leads ready to be converted also revolves around an awareness of the interests and desires of a prospective target segment.

Also, you can research other similar products or services, their campaigns and their successes or failures.

Set realistic goals

As with any task, you need to establish target milestones that are within your capacity. In social media, this is of great importance as one of the biggest pitfalls is devoting entirely too much time on these platforms without determining concrete social media marketing goals.

Take into account the resources you have available, the time you are willing to spend on your social marketing campaigns and a conservative estimate of how much return on investment you expect to achieve in the short to medium-term.

Choose your social media voice

This “voice” is defined by the way in which you engage with existing and potential customers. Instead of focusing on branding and hoping that quality alone will ensure sales, you should turn your attention to actively addressing the needs and queries of anyone who has taken an active interest.

What should be known here is that the quality of a product is also determined by how readily you interact with your audience. This approach will establish both credibility and the fact that your company cares about its reputation.

Choose the most effective media platforms

This is one of the most important areas to manage, and ironically the one that is mismanaged the most often. In targeted marketing, you need to focus your energies in the appropriate direction. Instead of joining ten or twelve media sites, choose a handful to begin with which make the most sense for your business.

For instance, if your product is intended to target young adults who are interested in the latest fashions, then demographically relevant sites such as Facebook would make the most sense.

Summarily, the more you know about your audience, the more insight you will gain on which sites they use the most.

Sync your social marketing plan with a content marketing strategy

Although this may sound complicated, the essence of this statement is that both your content publishing strategy and social media marketing plan need to go hand-in-hand.

The content you create and push through various channels, including social media, needs to be integrated with the schedules prepared for these platforms. This should help you prevent gaps and overlaps from affecting your broadcasting flow.

Measure your success

Ultimately, the power of social media campaigns resides in their measurable impact on conversions and their ability to change when needed.

This flexible approach needs to be proactive in nature; instead of asking yourself “How did I do?” you should be asking “How am I doing?”.

Conversion rates, opt-outs and feedback are very real indicators which will help you know whether your current strategy needs improving. These metrics can be evaluated with analytics tools that integrate social media sources and target segmentation.

Conclusion

One of the key tenets of any successful CRO strategy is the ability to adapt to changing environments. If we look back at the past years, nowhere has this proven to be more the case than with the impact social media has on business operations.

As more and more enterprises are including these platforms as another facet of their ongoing operations, a growing number of consumers are using these very same sites for product research and education. This market will continue to increase in both scope and importance, so establishing a flexible and transparent presence is a necessity for continuous growth.